One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word 'jam' can mean:

• a fruit preserve
• to play music
• heavy traffic
• a door that won't open
• to cram something into something else
• a difficult situation

Or 'saw', which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word 'run' apparently has over 600 different meanings!

We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example 'dust', which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or 'left', which can mean remaining ("I only have three left") or departing ("They left.")

IMO, the weirdest thing about English is something every speaker does but probably never thinks about.

Whenever multiple adjectives describe a single noun, there's a particular order in which they must go. If you have big tractor that's also green, you would call it a "big green tractor" but you would never call it a "green big tractor". Not only does it sound wrong, it's grammatically incorrect.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/one-weird-trick-for-adjective-order

The disparity between written English and its pronunciation. Identically written words represented with vastly different sounds, and no real and consistent system whatsoever.

I think what is exceptional for English is that negation and forming a question require a modal verb. You can say "I love apples" but not "*I not love apples", nor "*Love I apples?". This is rare in a language. (An exception for negation could be "Apples, I love not", but this does not sound like everyday speech.)

I always thought the celestial bodies thing was just another case of proper nouns. Jupiter is always capitalized because it’s a proper name.

But “the Moon” can be either. “the Moon” is the proper name of Earths natural satellite so should be capitalized, but “the moon” is a description of any planetary body’s natural satellite so should NOT be

Similar for “the Sun”. “the Sun” is the proper name of Earths star, but “the sun” is any solar system’s star. I like that in so much science fiction they’ve figured this out and use a distinct proper name, “Sol”

Personally I definitely think it's the pronunciation, which is... self explanatory. Other languages have weird grammar rules too, but even French pronunciation is more consistent 😭

Probably spelling, but there's one quirk in English that makes it so you can build the arguably weirdest sentence in any language. Here's the short version and explanation for people unaware of the 3 meanings of the word (which I'll use 3 different spellings to make it easier to understand):

• Buffalo is a city in USA
• a buffalo is another name for an animal also known as a bison
• To BUFFALO means to bother, or bully.

So a Buffalo buffalo is a Bison from the city of Buffalo. If a Bison from Buffalo were to bother another Bison from Buffalo, you get the common example of this phrase which is Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo which means Buffalo bison BOTHERS Buffalo bison. You can add an extra Buffalo at the start to make it a headline of a newspaper telling you where this happened, but that only gives you Buffalo, Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo....

But we can make it better. See, in English you can add specifiers to a noun, the way we're doing with Buffalo to specify this is a Bison from Buffalo, but the specification can be a full sentence. For example if we wanted to say that specify that the bison is known to bother other bisons you can call him a "bison bully" bison, or even if he's from Buffalo and only bullies other bisons from Buffalo he's a Buffalo "Buffalo bison bully" bison, or a Buffalo "Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO" buffalo.

Cool, so if a Bison from Buffalo known for bullying other bisons from Buffalo is bullying yet another Buffalo bison you can say that a "Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo".... But what if the bison it's bullying is also known to bully other bisons from buffalo? Then Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo

But our bison might actually EXCLUSIVELY bully bisons that bully other bisons, so he's a Buffalo bison BULLY BULLY, and if he's from the city of Buffalo he's a Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO. So if our heroic bison made a mistake and bullied another Bison who only bullies bullies then: Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO

And you can keep making the sentence infinitely long by specifying that tach bison in the story is a Buffalo bison Bully bison.

Dearest creature in creation, The weirdest part is pronunciation...

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

I would say orthography and/or the great vowel shift. Or, further, that it's very weird as Germanic languages go. Or, even further, the mix of old Norse and the various Saxon/jute/angle languages before the Normans came along (itself Norman french with old Norse admixture). Then throw various Celtic languages on that mess

Edit: completely left out those pesky Romans as well

You can verb pretty much any noun you like and get away with it, when used in such a manner the verbnoun takes on the typical action of the noun.

"Gunned down" is an example.

I don't think articles, definite or indefinite are the weirdest things about English, if only because other languages have the same features.

There have to be weirder things that are specific to this one language, but it's hard to find something that isn't shared by any other language, especially not the closely related ones. German goes one step further with the whole capitalisation thing, for example, where all nouns are capitalised, not just those that are names.

Perhaps we could go for how vowels all become, or at least move towards schwa in unstressed positions. That's the vowel at the end of "the" when unstressed and before a consonant. (German has some of this with final -e (and to some extent, the same with older French pronunciation), but it's not necessarily the same thing going on there.)

Consonant aspiration might be another oddity. Aspiration depends on position in a word in English and doesn't hold any semantic or grammatical meaning, but in other languages, an aspirated consonant can completely change the meaning of a word. I think Korean is one such language. They even have different letters for the different sounds.

If you don't know what aspiration is, it's the burst of air that follows some consonants. English speakers generally don't even know they're doing it. The often-used example is "pin" versus "spin", where the leading "p" of "pin" has far more air after it than it does in "spin".

I vote spelling. English spelling makes less sense than French or Danish and they take mothereffing liberties as well. No naturally occurring, alphabet using language will probably score perfect on that but I suspect English will be in the relegation zone of that table.

Per formal linguistics, it's "respectively".

Like: Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, and electrician, respectively.

We know this means Bob is a teacher and Siobhan is an electrician, but trying to write rules for how English works that account for this usage is thorny.

Is it the fact the way something is written almost has no bearing on how it's pronounced?

For me as someone who speaks english as a 2nd language this is definitely a big one

Though on the topic of the definite article, as a kid I found articles in general to be weird as my native language has none, so there were just these "untranslatable" words in front of some nouns for some reason

I vote for standardisation. So it's 'wierd.' I before e. It's more Germanic that way too. Food, moon, and good all pronounced the same way. Etc

The wierdest thing? That it's used in so many places instead of good, solid, consistent Latin

Gallagher on the English Language.